Jamie was six when she started drawing. Her passion began with simple shapes; lower case m’s perfectly represented birds and lazy circles could be clouds or bushes. One of her best pieces was displayed on the refrigerator of her quaint apartment, one of the best galleries in the world. She was a proud child; she figured that being a self-taught artist was a big deal so she must have also been a big deal. She loved starting a new piece; the white copier paper and the smell of a freshly sharpened pencil served as her inspiration. She never fretted on mistakes, she would just incorporate them into a new creative piece and try her original idea another time. As Jamie grew, so did her art, her love for it never faltering. Her drawings of people started to look more realistic instead of the typical anorexic looking stick figures with smiling faces and empty eyes. By the eighth grade, she finally mastered how to draw a hand without the fingers looking like sausages or hiding them behind the characters to make up for her inexperience. She invested her emotions into her pieces, sketching through her weird ninth grade Goth phase, her tenth grade prep phase, and all of the breakups and makeups. Through it all, Jamie was confident she was getting better and better with every finished piece.
Then she stopped. It happened after her teacher caught her drawing a naked woman after she finished her test. She had yet to draw on clothes. She was too busy focusing on getting the body proportions just right when Mrs. Greenwich walked by. “What are you doing,” she yelled. Jamie was too caught off guard to give an answer and before she knew it, Mrs. Greenwich firmly held Jamie’s elbow in her wrinkled hands and dragged her to the principal’s office with a strength and speed little old women with Texan accents were not supposed to have. The principal, a man with a red face and a shirt collar so tight that his neck seemed to burst from his shirt, called Jamie’s mother.
He told her that Jamie was drawing pornography and this was unacceptable behavior from a little girl. They would be a little understanding if she were a little boy and drawing these blasphemous images because boys will be boys. But for a young girl to be doing such things, Jamie must have learned this perverted behavior from home and her mother should keep a closer eye on Jamie. Her mother was so embarrassed that when she looked at Jamie, she might as well have stamped “Disappointment” on Jamie’s forehead in thick, red, dripping ink. It was enough for Jamie to lose all motivation in being an artist. Now, Jamie is majoring in chemistry at the same state university her mother graduated from, doodling over the figures and graphs in her textbook. Although she tried to ignore her childhood passion, it seems to still permeate her daily life every time she holds a pencil in her hands.
